Poster Session Fostering empathy to improve the quality of collaborative writing in an AI-assisted writing classroom more

This study intends to explore the use of AI to assist twenty EFL Taiwanese university students in cultivating empathy and examine whether this skill development can improve the quality of their collaborative written works. It adopts a mixed-methods approach to collect data, including learners' pre- and post- self-report empathy scales, pre-test and post-test collaborative written works, and peer feedback. Content analysis is used to analyze the written data and peer feedback. The learners complete five collaborative writing tasks as part of their writing course throughout the semester. Before each task, they receive guidance on empathetic communication from the researcher working with AI to create written scenarios illustrating the empathetic discourses being taught. Throughout the study, it is anticipated that the learners can cultivate empathy, foster mutual trust and collaboration, which in turn is expected to enhance their collaborative writing. The findings of the study will be presented at the conference.